Mike Ramos, San Bernardino County district attorney, left, stands with former California governors, left to right, George Deukmejian, Gray Davis and Pete Wilson, gathered to promote death penalty reform Feb. 13 in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

If those slightly shabby and desperate looking folks with clipboards outside your supermarket gather enough signatures over the next few months, Californians will be asked to vote on the death penalty for the second time in two years when they go to the polls in November.

If you missed the groundswell of popular discontent over the state’s current legal approach to capital punishment, that’s because there isn’t one. Nothing unusual about that, though, since the initiative process long ago ceased to be an instrument of popular sovereignty and became a tool of monied special interests and those with the ability to raise funds. Those signature-gathers work for political contractors and are paid for their work. For a million dollars, you can qualify a ballot measure declaring the Earth flat; it won’t pass, but the rest of us still will have to go to the trouble of voting it down.

The public advocates for this latest proposition are a group of ex-elected officials — former governors George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis, along with retired Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley — along with current San Bernardino County DA Michael A. Ramos. Their measure is likely to be financed mainly by the usual coalition of peace officer unions, the casino-rich Indian tribes that share political consultants with them and the handful of conservative campaign donors who make a hobby of fiddling with the criminal justice system.

What they want is to speed the execution of the 733 prisoners California currently holds on its death row at San Quentin. To that end, their measure would dramatically reduce the procedural safeguards that now surround California’s imposition of capital punishment by stripping most of those convicted of their right of appeal to the state Supreme Court and distributing those cases to lower courts. The initiative would require that all appeals be resolved within five years of conviction. As a cost-saving measure, death row would be abolished and its inmates distributed throughout the prison system. Doctors who advise on execution protocols would be shielded from any professional sanction and the public would lose its legal right to review and comment on the method of execution. While awaiting execution, condemned prisoners would be required to work and their compensation would be paid as restitution to the families of their victims.

“We all know the death penalty system is broken at the appellate level,” Cooley told an L.A. press conference, hence the focus on greasing the legal skids into the death chamber.

If the measure qualifies for the ballot — and despite the lack of public pressure on this issue, it probably will — it will be the second time in as many years that Californians will have to reconsider their capital punishment law. In 2012, they narrowly rejected a proposal, Proposition 34, to replace the death penalty with a mandatory sentence of life without possibility of parole, 52 percent to 48 percent. Despite that close margin, which surprised most experienced political observers in the state, the governors asserted that “Californians overwhelmingly reaffirmed their support for the death penalty, when they defeated 34.”

That’s pretty much the way political rhetoric on this question always has gone in this state, but if the abolition measure demonstrated anything, it was Californians’ deep ambivalence toward capital punishment.

Since the U.S. allowed the states to resume administration of the death penalty in 1973, California has executed only 13 people at an estimated cost of $4 billion. Over that same period, 57 death row inmates have died of natural causes, six have died from other causes and 20 have taken their own lives. If prisoners are dispersed into the general populations, as this new measure proposes, look for both those latter numbers to skyrocket. Moreover, how the lower courts, already underfunded, overburdened and facing deep budget-related cutbacks, are now supposed to handle complex and time-consuming death penalty appeals is anybody’s guess.

As Anna Zamora of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California put it, “This flawed proposal will only make matters worse. It will create more delays and overburden our already strained court system. Worst of all, it will greatly increase the risk that California could execute an innocent person.”

That latter point is one that seems to resonate with an increasing number of people — not only in this state, but across the country. Whatever they may think and feel about crime and punishment, Americans are at heart pragmatic empiricists. Over the past decade the increasing admission of definitive DNA evidence has repeatedly demonstrated just how fallible our criminal justice system can be. Hardly a month goes by without an inmate — often one imprisoned for decades — being set free when genetic evidence demonstrates his or her innocence.

Since 1973, 140 Americans living under sentence of death have been exonerated after the discovery of new evidence. Since 2000, when use of DNA became more general, those exonerations have proceeded at the rate of five per year.

What that suggests to many of us is that it’s a poor idea to give an absolutely irrevocable conclusion to a system that regularly errs. None of those exonerations, by the way, have occurred in California. That’s precisely because most of our district attorneys are rigorous about charging only those accused on solid evidence of the most heinous crimes — as Cooley was during his term — and our scrupulous appellate system provides competent counsel and thorough judicial review after conviction at trial. Now, the electorate is being asked to sweep those safeguards away.

Why?

Obviously, we’re not in the grip of a crime wave. Except in the handful of spots where feckless city governments — say, San Bernardino, Oakland and Stockton — have deprived their police of adequate resources, crime rates of all kinds, have fallen to historic lows unseen for more than 60 years. Nor is there any real evidence that the existence of the death penalty deters prospective killers from committing their crime. California is one of 33 states with a capital punishment statute on its books, but if you examine the national statistics you’ll find that, since 1991, the aggregate murder rate in states without the death penalty has been lower than those that execute — in some years, by as much as 46 percent. In fact, nine out of 10 of the states with the highest murder rate are death penalty states.

Still, as the narrow defeat of Prop. 34 two years ago demonstrates, Californians are reluctant to abolish capital punishment altogether. What the record suggests is that they want a death penalty law on the books, but few — if any — executions.

It’s not surprising, just another example of how this state’s voters like having things both ways.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.

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